Текст книги "I Was Born There, I Was Born Here"

Автор книги: Mourid Barghouti

сообщить о нарушении

Текущая страница: 10 (всего у книги 13 страниц)

The Chinese poet Bei Dao asked him what had changed around him in the world, whose events he had lived through for decades. Arafat asked his assistant Abu Rudina to bring him a certain three-dimensional model. Abu Rudina couldn’t find it, so he got up himself, begging pardon of his guests the writers, and fetched from the top of a wooden cupboard at the end of the room a model of a mosque, a church, and a synagogue. He told them, “I may be the only leader in the world who has a model like this in his office. The three religions are all here in my office.”

The delegates appeared pleased.

“Another mistake,” I thought to myself. “It’s fine for him to take credit for religious tolerance as a general intellectual position, but who says our conflict with Israel is religious?”

The conflict didn’t start in heaven and it won’t be solved in heaven. It’s a conflict over this land. It began because it was occupied and there will be no solution until that occupation ends.

Our problem with the Jew doesn’t lie in his heaven, but in his helmet, which he claims is heaven, and in his rifle, which has been pointing at our heads for decades.

The Jew roofs his head with his helmet and the roof of a Palestinian house flies off. The Jewish settler’s helmet is the Palestinian refugee’s tent.

For thirty years, Arafat sank slowly into his mistakes, while his and our enemies urged him on in the hope that in the end he’d drown. His assistants and advisors, whom he had chosen, were unable to save him because all they’d learned from each new ordeal was how to save their own skins. His Palestinian opponents in other factions were too weak to resist his intrigues and tactics and so lost every round in their battle against the path he took.

Arafat was a master at demolishing his opponents but not at demolishing his enemies.

When we stood up to say goodbye at the end of the meeting, he asked us to wait a little.

He went to his desk at the other end of the room, squatted down to search though the drawers for something, and then returned, his hands full of small, square boxes that he hugged to his chest to prevent from falling. He started opening the boxes one by one and taking out small, ordinary-looking pins, one of which he stuck onto the chest of each of his guests, as though it were the highest of decorations.

When it was my turn I examined the one he gave me closely.

It was a round plastic badge, about as small as a piastre coin, on which was written “Bethlehem 2000.” Bethlehem 2000 was a tourism project to prepare that city for the third millennium celebrations, and had been over and done with for two years. The pins that he distributed to his guests were obviously the remaining few of thousands that the city’s residents and visitors had stuck on their chests for that occasion. He had wanted to give a presidential souvenir to his guests but, imprisoned as he was by this siege that had turned a loaf of bread or a cup of water into a rarity, could find nothing other than this humble plastic pin. Despite this, Arafat presented the pins with the flourish of the host who has little to offer but “makes a feast of whatever’s to hand” and the grace of one who is never at a loss, no matter how difficult the circumstances.

Later, when the news of his death reaches us while I’m on a literary tour in “the most beautiful spot in the English countryside,” near Hadrian’s Wall, I will inform the tour’s organizer that I want to return to London the next morning and I do so.

I cut short my tour and returned on my own to London, not to do anything particular but because, quite simply, I couldn’t remain in “the most beautiful spot in the English countryside” on a day like that.

The long reel turned in my mind. This Arab leader, whose food was worse than my food, whose drink was worse than my drink, whose clothes were less elegant than my clothes, whose picture was hung on a shattered wall framed by the roar of the missiles, bombs, and bullets aimed at him, was abandoned in the night of his headquarters – lit by one, or two, candles discovered somewhere by accident – by every other Arab leader. They didn’t send him a loaf of bread or a glass of water. They didn’t ask Sharon to lift the siege. In fact, because of their policy of collaboration with Israeli and American policy, they continued to pressure him, pushing him into making concession after concession. His error in signing the Oslo Agreement was only one of the results of their pressure on him and of his despair that any good could come from these quaking regimes, afflicted with the sickness I call “the fear of victory.”

These were the leaders who had competed so hard to have their picture taken standing next to him so as to gain the affection of their people by playing the Palestinian card. The issue was no longer ‘political’ for me; it had become at times an existential scene and at others a demonstration of men’s destinies and the turning of Fortuna’s wheel, casting those destinies down from zenith to nadir. It was the same scene that has filled the shelves of libraries with Greek tragedies, whose sad hymns, sung by choruses of ill-tidings and bad omens, make nature tremble, and which have taught men’s hands the meaning of the lowering of the curtain in the fifth act.

The helicopter carried him from the courtyard of the Muqata‘a to his hospital in Paris. Like a child he distributed kisses into the air to its right and left, with a strange repetitiveness. They were the same kisses that had saved him so many times in his life before when he had planted them on the cheeks of the very leaders who had been afraid to get close to him out of fear of the Master in his White House, leaders who believed the eternal charge of terrorism that had been attached to him and his whole people so that justice could maintain its contrived absence. Justice does not disappear by coincidence. It disappears only beneath a military boot or a silent tongue. These kisses of his were now kisses for his people, who came out to bid him farewell on his journey to the cure that in the end failed to cure him.

I, the simple citizen who didn’t support his policies, was comfortably ensconced in “the most beautiful spot in the English countryside,” while he was in the hands of his doctors and needed a gulp of air, while he was in his shroud and needed two meters of land in his city of Jerusalem so that its earth might gather his short body and long story into its memory. But he was also the only Arab ‘president’ to say no to the most powerful nation in the world, a president who refused to abdicate and who died a suspicious death whose secret will come out only with a major advance in the science of poisons.

Some saw him as a father. I didn’t see him as a father in any way. I reject in principle the idea of the leader as a father. I reject the idea of citizens as ‘children’ and I reject the idea of the nation being ‘a family.’

All the same, his simple death was too complex for me to accept as one does life’s recurrent rites. I feel a degree of guilt and regret for my earlier stands and of perplexity over how to define his historical legacy and put a precise name to what history will retain of him.

Wait, though. He played his role as a politician who sometimes got things right and sometimes got them wrong, and I played what I believe is the role of the citizen, which is not restricted to applause.

The humanity of a leader doesn’t show in how he carries on the game of politics; it shows in those moments when politics are absent. He would visit us at Broadcasting House in Cairo and everyone would have falafel for lunch, the patties spread out on newspaper or the drafts of the political commentaries we’d prepared for the microphone in the hope that they’d set fire to the ground beneath the Occupation’s feet and ignite the Revolution in the breasts of the Palestinians. If we decided to celebrate, lunch would be fried fish from a restaurant that delivered, with plastic knives and forks that broke at the first bite, so that we’d end up using our hands instead. We’d drink water from paper or plastic cups, standing in line in front of a miserable tap in the broadcasting service’s poverty-stricken building, before continuing our conversation and he’d say things, some of which we liked and some of which we didn’t. I used to say to my colleagues at the Voice of Palestine, “If this man succeeds in bringing an end to the Occupation and becomes president of our ‘independent Palestinian republic,’ he’ll be the only one in the Arab world to have gained his position by right of struggle, sweat, and long nights, and not by a coup, a rigged election, a referendum whose results are known beforehand, or the support of the CIA and the Pentagon.” So what happened?

The Oslo Agreement bestowed on him a photocopy of the position of president. And now he’s escaped the siege for an eternal absence, and Palestine is still waiting. And it will be a painful wait, more painful perhaps than the man imagined.

The real catastrophe for the Palestinians these days is that they find themselves under the leadership of the pupils in the absence of the master.

At the hands of these pupils and thanks to their erratic stumbling around between the national project and their inability to defend it, the Palestinian Authority has turned into a huge NGO living off the financial assistance of the European countries, while Europe fails to realize that through its expenditures on the Palestinian Authority it simply finances and prolongs the Israeli military occupation. Israel occupies the country, Europe pays the costs of that occupation, and the Authority implements Israel’s conditions. Yes! From a liberation movement of stubborn persistence it has tuned into a fat, flabby NGO at which they brandish the stick and the carrot and which out of fear of the first pants naively after the second, unaware that throughout history it is precisely the carrot that has embodied the underhandedness of imperialism. No one swallows the stick, because they’re afraid of choking on it. Indeed, the stick may incite resistance, endurance, and defiance, and make one search for the sources of one’s strength in order, at least, to defend oneself. It is the carrot that is the real threat. The carrot is smooth, soft, and tasty at one end; little by little, however, as one moves toward the other, it gets thicker, coarser, and woodier. The imperialist carrot is in fact the real stick.

This is what the Authority hasn’t learned.

This Authority walks, and sometimes runs energetically, sincerely, and self-sacrificingly, after a poisoned chalice but trips over the hem of its drawers and falls down at every step. When it gets back up and tries to resume its progress, it finds it has distanced itself from the people, ignored their small, pressing needs, is now worlds apart from them, and has lost control of even its own helpers and supporters. Distance from and contempt for the people as individuals is a recipe for disaster in any political action. There is near consensus among Palestinians that the armed and bloody infighting between Fatah and Hamas would not have occurred if Arafat had been alive. This is not because he was a saint, for even a saint can’t still be a saint after forty continuous years in power and is bound to commit a series of mistakes and sins – and Arafat may have committed many or few – but because Arafat knew how to keep control of his aides no matter how far they might go, and how to take the wind out of the sails of his opponents in the other factions. Bloody civil war wasn’t part of Arafat’s political vocabulary, even if events may sometimes have taken him to its brink.

The next day was my meeting with Marwan al-Barghouti. I discovered that the absence of Marwan – an excellent reader and follower of political and literary writings in the Arab world – from our international writers program had been due to security concerns, but that he had followed the stands and statements of Christian Salmon, Wole Soyinka, Breyten Breytenbach, Saramago, and Consolo from his place of hiding. He spoke at length of the need for Palestine to become once more the point of convergence for people of conscience the world over.

Neither he nor I then knew that a few days later he’d be arrested, to disappear under a long sentence into the prisons of the Occupation, and that Palestine would lose the efforts of one of its honest men.

The most beautiful event of the writers’ visit took place at the Qasaba Theater in Ramallah with the evening of joint readings by Palestinians poets and the guest writers. The star of the evening was the audience, which exceeded a thousand women and men who had come to the theater from every part of the Bank, despite the siege. Despite the dangers and annoyances of the checkpoints, they stayed on till midnight, for the poetry and the literature and to welcome the writers as their guests. The audience listened to readings in languages they did not know with such respect and enjoyment that one could have heard a pin drop, and by the end of the evening they were so taken by its magic that they stood and applauded for many minutes. The Qasaba Theater and Cinema Club was formerly a beautiful old cinema close to our house in the Liftawi Building; the director and actor George Ibrahim has converted it into its present elegant form. The people of Ramallah have taken the place to their hearts and professional and amateur theater troupes have been active in presenting their varied works on its stage.

Later, almost immediately after this rare writers’ evening and just three days after the writers had left, Israeli tanks will force their way into the city of Ramallah and vandalize the Qasaba. The soldiers will enter and destroy the sets, backdrops, curtains, and seats while the echoes of our readings and those of our guests are still reverberating in its air. One journalist wrote of this incident that “it was as though they were trying to destroy any possibility of the resumption of speech.”

They also broke into the building of the Ministry of Culture, a tall block overlooking Arafat’s headquarters, and destroyed it, leaving it full of filth. They would repeat the same acts in all the cities of the ‘West’ Bank, leaving our dead on the doorsteps of their homes.

What scares me most is that we might get used to the idea of death, as though it were our unique lot or the only result that we have to expect from any confrontation. I want us to think, with each of death’s victories, of the magnificence of life. In a poem I will write later, I ask myself,

Why, when I see a dead man stretched out on the ground,

Do I believe it’s someone thinking?

At the end of the visit, at a meeting between the guest writers and Israeli writers of all persuasions, the words of the well-known Israeli writer and activist Yehudit Harel – as communicated by the news agencies to those of us who weren’t there – seemed the most daring and clear. In defending Saramago and attacking his critics among the Israeli intelligentsia, she said, “Perhaps there never really was an ‘Israeli peace camp.’ Even if we suppose the opposite, we now know for sure that it vanished two years ago, probably because of the misuse of words and because of the idea that dominates our thinking specifically that makes us speak of ourselves and of the Palestinians as though we are moving in a vicious circle of mutual violence, for which the responsibility falls on both parties equally.”

Yehudit Harel went on to say, “I wish to protest against this false balance and this abuse of language. The circle of violence is not formed of two equal sides. One side is the Occupier and the other is the victim of our occupation. Nevertheless, we still apply the word ‘violence’ to every outburst of Palestinian resistance, to every battle for liberation to which they have recourse, and to every act of resistance to our occupation. This is not violence. It is legitimate rebellion.”

Later, the visit will be documented in a film called Writers on the Borders, which ends with Yehudit Harel’s plea to this delegation of people of letters from every corner of the world: “I trust in you, when you return to your countries, to help us rid ourselves of these dishonest mythologies, of which we have become ourselves the victims.”

8. The Alhambra

The moment he opened the door of the apartment to me to show me around, I was assaulted by the color red – the wall-to-wall carpeting was red and on it squatted a large couch with, arranged around it, four chairs of the sort that are almost too heavy to move. These were red too. The curtains were (by way of a change) pink. The bedroom was brown and had a balcony that looked out over a kitchen garden in which were a mulberry tree, a loquat tree, a lemon tree, and a spacious old single-story house. The kitchen was a reasonable size and from it a wide passageway led to a surprisingly elegant bathroom. From the neighbors’ kitchen garden rose the voice of Fayrouz:

Give him my greetings

And tell him that I greet him,

You who understand his ways.

Greet him from me,

Greet him.

Then I heard the sound of a piano trying to pick out the song; the player was clearly just a beginner. I decided to take the apartment. Next day I fetched my suitcase from the Yasmin Building and took up residence in what I would call ‘the Alhambra.’ I went to a shop to buy houseplants and picked out a tall bush with dense elongated leaves like those of a mango. I asked where it was from and the salesman told me Thailand and gave me its difficult name, which I forgot despite my best attempts. I put it in the corner of the living room closest to the window, where it was the only thing in the furnished apartment that I owned and had chosen for myself, and it immediately claimed me as its owner. It grew fast, as did our friendly, familiar, and sociable relationship.

I took up my duties at the foundation.

I observed the Namiq and his doings firsthand. I don’t need to go into detail as the Namiq is himself the detail. The Namiq is an indestructible survivor, because he has fashioned himself to fit the preferences of the Authority and the Authority has fashioned the Namiq to fit its preferences. The Namiqs returning from Tunis sought out the resident Namiqs and extended their hands to them, along with opportunities and profits. Thus was formed the alliance that is the last and worst thing that a liberation movement needs. I had agreed to be director of the foundation for a year and from the first weeks it became obvious that it was consumed from the inside by financial corruption – falsified invoices, salaries for non-existent employees, allowances, per diems for journeys never made, and seventy employees to do work that needed twenty at most. As usual, corruption won, albeit only partially this time. I tried and neither succeeded totally nor failed totally. In the current delicate Palestinian situation, this must be considered total failure.

Life teaches us a lesson that cannot be ignored: it isn’t enough for some of the players in the orchestra to do their work well; it’s either collective excellence or cacophony. If that’s true of music, how much more so must it be when an entire people wishes to bring life itself back from its hiding place, so they can know it and live it?

I placed a pile of forged and suspect invoices on the table of the project’s financial director and asked him to take the necessary steps vis-à-vis the payees. He advised me to sign them for payment.

I presented my resignation, which was refused, so I called a meeting where I said, “I am the weakest person at this meeting. I have no party, no faction, no one in what you call ‘the government’ to protect me, and no clique anywhere to support me. But I do have this” and I raised my pen in my right hand for all of them to see.

The next day, I went into my office and could hardly recognize it.

A set of black leather chairs.

New curtains,

A new computer,

A laser printer,

A new carpet.

They were running a test. Would a new office be enough to make him shut up?

I presented my resignation and left for Amman the same day without waiting for a reply.

After numerous intercessions from persons I respect who promised to bring pressure to bear to improve things, I reluctantly returned after thirty-five days of absence.

Things changed for the better for two or three months and then the collusion with theft started again. The end of the project brought true relief. By the time I returned to Cairo, any hope I might have had that things would straighten themselves out under this Authority had vanished.

My residence in Ramallah for a number of successive months (the period of my protest resignation excluded) had allowed me to observe the political and economic kitchen from the inside, and what I’d seen wasn’t pretty. I told myself that my chronic opposition had been totally justified and I’d been unjust to none. I had upbraided myself for my isolation and my dedication to reading and writing but now, after having been granted this further opportunity to experience government practice from the inside, I decided to respect my voluntary isolation and maintain it forevermore.

This time I returned to my isolation with an easy conscience.

The Namiqs will continue to be masters of the hidden and the public world and this will last forever.

My near daily battles to stop the squandering of money made me enemies, who would fight me with a look, or words, or by trying to do me harm. Those who should have cared and whom I asked for support demonstrated their expertise at evasion and flight. I stopped asking them for anything.

Once more I depart.

Once more I withdraw.

Once more I flee.

Once more I’m too much of a coward to butt heads with the bastards.

I say a thing and its opposite at one and the same time. I tell myself I’m a coward and not strong enough to butt heads with them. Then I say that I’m not a bull that I should charge other bulls and that I refuse to be made into a bull. I want to accept the situation like a proper man or oppose it like a proper man.

The Namiqs won’t allow your humanity to function. They want you to be either a hopeless floor rag or a hopeless monster and I’m neither the one nor the other. My withdrawal may place me outside events, but I’m certain that the homeland won’t be liberated by either a floor rag or a monster.

This time I withdraw without regret. It amazes me that Israel doesn’t abandon its attacks and random killings. It’s as though it doesn’t want to facilitate the success of the Namiq party in the Authority’s activities. It strikes the ‘moderates’ with the same viciousness as the ‘hardliners’ and doesn’t let either camp achieve anything that it could offer the people as a justification for continuing to rule in their name.

During this period, I made the decision to organize my work so that it didn’t take the pleasure out of my whole day. I took the evenings for myself, and weekend mornings the same. On those mornings I would go out to the Upside Down café in front of Ramallah Park and have my coffee and breakfast before setting the program for my day.

It was a cloudy morning in February. The sky, which was the color of white grapes, was low, and the fine rain had the demeanor of a placid guest. My gaze shifted from the piece of paper in front of me on the table to the three towering cypresses at the entrance to Ramallah Park and back. Every time I set myself to work on something, it would escape me and gradually fade away and I’d be once more like someone kidnapped by fairies, gazing at the cypresses as though something was puzzling me.

That’s how it usually is: when your eyes delete all the objects in your field of vision and leave only one, that object arrests their entire attention, and that object, which is now the only thing you can see, is your next passion or your next poem.

Suddenly,

That music that never emanates from any visible source engulfed me.

So it’s a poem.

It’s poetry.

I ask the waiter for blank paper and a cup of coffee and to lower the volume of Umm Kulthoum’s voice a little, which he does.

I take out my pen and start writing:

Transparent and frail,

like the slumber of woodcutters,

serene, portending things to come,

the morning drizzle does not conceal

these three cypresses on the slope.

Their details belie their sameness,

their radiance confirms it.

I said:

I wouldn’t dare to keep looking at them,

there is a beauty that takes away our daring,

there are times when courage fades away.

The clouds rolling high above

change the form of the cypresses.

The birds flying toward alternative skies

change the resonance of the cypresses.

The tiled line behind them

fixes the greenness of the cypresses

and there are trees whose only fruit is greenness.

Yesterday, in my sudden cheerfulness,

I saw their immortality.

Today, in my sudden sorrow,

I saw the axe.

I went to Amman once every one or two months.

I’d spend Thursday evening and Friday with my mother. She’d see me and I’d see her and we’d be reassured. I’d return to Ramallah before noon on Saturday and be in my office on Sunday morning.

Those months spent between Ramallah and Amman were months of poems, or beginnings of poems. I lived in a state of love with the autumnal and wintry weather in the hills and valleys of Ramallah and with the two gardens of the house in Amman. I adore the winter and the rain and the trees and I adore the light of the world at eleven o’clock in the morning under the fine rain, with the song “Give Him My Greetings” and Luciano Pavarotti, and I adore having the draft of a new poem on my desk in front of me and adding or erasing lines.

I am one who loves the sound of rain on something hard. When thunder and lightening come with the rain, I feel a need to do something. I go out onto the street without an umbrella, I jump and cry out and yell like a fool, and I return to the warmth of my room, bringing with me an intoxication that my body can’t contain and I don’t know what to do with.

One winter the snow fell thickly, so Muhammad, my brother ‘Alaa’s son, and I went out to play in it. I was surprised to find him yelling, running, and turning circles with evident joy. He hadn’t seen snow since he was a child because he’d been living in the Gulf with his parents and had only recently come to join the University of Jordan in Amman. I was surprised to hear him ask me as he leapt and laughed – or perhaps he was really asking himself—“Uncle Mourid, what are you supposed to do when you’re happy?”

I looked at him in astonishment. He added, “Seriously. I’m happy and don’t know what to do about it.”

The path to my white office in my mother’s house in Amman is lined with lavender, ivy, rosemary, bird-of-paradise flowers, geraniums, jasmine, and one short palm tree – a raised garden on whose left a flight of steps leads to my garden at a lower level. The sound of shoes coming down the steps alerts me to visitors, the thought of some making me overjoyed, of others miserable. The burden of keeping away visitors I don’t wish to see has fallen on my mother.

“He’s writing.”

I put the mighty-bodied Pavarotti into the tape recorder and let the ecstasy he brings play tug of war with me, my world, and the rest of the world, toppling us head over heels into pleasure, the three of us rolling around on the ground of secrets and in the seductiveness of poetry. Not my family, nor my readers, nor the street, nor the windows surrounding the house, nor anyone in the whole city knows what Pavarotti does to this white room. His firm voice is a bronze hand that pushes me to write and legs on which I run in a daze from which I wake when I crash into a tree that is naked of all but birds, a tree with a voice and huge wings on either side. The voice of the tree seduces me into listening to my voice, which is hidden at a depth of which I am aware only when I make it a written voice, a voice that throws me into its forest and leaves me to find my way among the shadows and lights and unexpected beasts that lurk among them. I see a naked gazelle I see a lofty tree I see broken spears I see panthers yowling at their mates I see a single jasmine flower on black satin. I see a red that is hot to the touch I see holes in the earth waiting for their tenants to be borne to them with terrifying solemnity.

Here I feel joy, sadness, and fear. I hate my loneliness and I love it and long to leave and long to stay, so I do not truly leave and do not truly stay and am become more than my body.

I begin my day at five in the morning with a tour of the trees and rose bushes in the garden, shears in hand – not to harm them but to grant them the life they need to bloom. If we don’t cut the roses from the branches, the bush will stop doing the only job it does well – the rose.

I return to the bath tub and its soapy hills, after adding lavender or bay or rosemary leaves and sometimes sprigs of the pepper plant, mint, pelargonium, or sage, and sometimes all of them together. I follow this with a very hot shower followed by a very cold one, as I have done for years beyond numbering, even if snow blankets the world outdoors.

After this, I go upstairs to join my mother for our morning coffee and listen to the plan for her day. Usually she starts with her standard question, “What shall I cook for you today?” I answer straight away with the name of some dish and she feels a sense of great repose. The thing a mother least wants to hear in answer to that question is “Whatever you like” or “It doesn’t matter” or “Anything” and I’ve learned to name the day’s dish for her quickly and without hesitation. After the morning chat, I take my leave of her, return to my office downstairs, and sit down to reconnoitre the possibility of writing.

I may write two lines or two pages or the sheets of paper may stay white and unblemished. Poetry is like love, like the world, like the unknown destiny of man – rough or smooth, and sometimes rough and smooth together, and the rough talks to the smooth in the poem the way the drums talk to the flutes in the orchestra. In this way the poem conceals what it wants in order to reveal it more clearly.